Santa Rosa attorney Ed Anderson and his wife, Jeanne, die days apart

As one of Sonoma County’s most celebrated attorneys and liveliest minds, Ed Anderson counseled the likes of “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles M. Schulz and globally known artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. He died on Nov. 29, just six days after the passing of his wife and partner in all things, Jeanne Anderson.

The Andersons were for more than 60 years supremely prominent and admired in greater Santa Rosa legal and social circles — and the hosts of one of the town’s cheeriest and most musical Christmas parties. They would have marked their 65th wedding anniversary on Dec. 26.

Ed Anderson, co-founder of the landmark Anderson Zeigler law firm, was renowned not only for his legal brilliance but for the extraordinary verve that powered his passion for early American history, tennis and fitness, writing and oratory, and for keeping about 50 books always at his bedside to feed a voracious appetite for knowledge in myriad, far-flung aspects of life.

He was 89.

“He was just so smart,” said longtime friend and law-firm partner Barbara Gallagher. “And he was well balanced. He wasn’t an intellectual elitist or anything, he was down-to-earth.”

Observed Chuck Bartley, a friend since 1951: “He made everybody laugh, and you don’t know many lawyers that do that.

“Everybody loved Ed Anderson.”

Both Anderson and the former Jeanne Mary Baylor grew up in Washington state. They met there years before they married in 1955.

Jeanne Anderson trained as a teacher in Washington and started her career there. When she and Ed moved to Santa Rosa the same year they married, she became active as a parent and helper at St. Eugene’s Cathedral School, filling in as a substitute teacher when needed.

The mother of four children, Jeanne Anderson reigned over the family home in Santa Rosa and the countless, splendidly arranged dinner parties and other occasions that took place there.

“She really ran the whole show,” said son Timothy Anderson of Santa Rosa. “The house was hers.”

In addition to rearing her own kids, she and her husband were instrumental also in bringing up the three children of their daughter, Mary Jo.

Jeanne Anderson was 90.

In recent years, she struggled with dementia and her husband with Alzheimer’s disease, but they did so as they’d done everything, together.

Among the couple’s many friends were Jean and the late Charles “Sparky” Schulz. Ed Anderson served for decades as the famed cartoonist’s attorney.

Jean Schulz said her husband greatly enjoyed Ed Anderson’s fascination with founding father Thomas Paine and many other characters and elements of Revolution-period history.

“Sparky always loved listening to him,” Jean Schulz said. “We always followed along with everything he was doing, everything he was learning about. Ed just was always interesting and always fun, and always came up with something novel.”

Anderson for years took great joy in talking about the in-progress book on Paine into which he poured countless hours of professional-grade research. His son Tim recalled that not everyone was as eager to hear about it and about his dad’s other historical insights and questions as was Charles Schulz.

The younger Anderson remembers his mother admonishing his father prior to one party at the house, “Don’t talk about the four-letter word, ’book’.”

Jean Schulz witnessed many times not only Anderson’s gleeful fascination with American history but his genius as a speechwriter and a speaker.

In 2001, the Andersons accompanied Schulz to Washington, D.C., for the posthumous awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to her husband, who was 77 when he died of colon cancer in early 2000. Several renowned congressional leaders had spoken when it came time for Ed Anderson to say something about his friend and client the cartoonist.

“I could see the legislators’ heads sort of whipping around,” Jean Schulz said. From the looks on their faces, they were thinking, “Who is this guy? He talks better than we do.”

Jean Schulz also credits Anderson as one of two people, the other being late Santa Rosa cartoon promoter and enthusiast Mark Cohen, who wore down her husband’s stubborn resistance to the creation of a museum of his works and his life. Thanks in large part to Anderson’s influence, the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center opened in August 2002 a stone’s throw from the Schulz family’s ice arena near Coddingtown Mall.

Anderson was long a force on the museum’s board of directors.

In the early 1970s, some of his law partners and colleagues thought he’d taken leave of his senses when he agreed to provide legal counsel and advocacy to a pair of artists from Bulgaria and Morocco who schemed to erect a temporary curtain across the ranch land of western Sonoma and Marin counties.

Fellow attorney Gallagher said Anderson met with Christo and Jeanne-Claude and let them lay out their vision for the Running Fence.

“Ed,” Gallagher said, “was open-minded enough to be slightly intrigued by the whole thing.”

Anderson signed on, and for the better part of four years helped the artists navigate the bureaucratic and regulatory obstacle course that stood between them and the start of work on their envisioned serpentine, 24.5-mile fence of white nylon fabric strung on cable between steel poles. Sonoma County was in the news around the world when the piece of art billowed in the breeze for 14 days in September 1976.

For years afterward, Ed and Jeanne Anderson boarded airplanes when Jeanne-Claude and Christo prepared to open other audacious works of environmental sculpture around the world. Jeanne-Claude died late in 2009 at 74, Christo died in May at 84.

Not long after the Andersons set roots in Santa Rosa in 1955, Ed Anderson joined the city’s oldest law firm, the Spridgen firm. There he met and befriended attorney Kurt Zeigler. In 1982, the two of them and Robert Disharoon founded a law firm of their own, still known as Anderson Zeigler.

Anderson specialized in estate and tax planning, but shone in myriad areas of law.

“Ed was really the heart and soul of our firm,” said Gallagher, who became a partner in the practice.

“His strength was always seeing the big picture, the forest for the trees. And he was very good at entrusting the care of the trees to his colleagues.”

Tim Anderson recalled that for decades, Zeigler arrived at the firm at about 5 a.m. The elder Anderson would show up about 9 a.m., put in a long day, go home for dinner, then return to his office and work until about 9 p.m.

The partners, Tim Anderson said, “would say that the lights always were on at Anderson Zeigler.”

“He loved the law,” the younger Anderson said of his father. “He absolutely loved the law. And he loved to help people.”

Ed Anderson had begun to show signs of memory loss when he retired from the firm in 2016. His friend and former partner Zeigler died in April at age 80.

Tim Anderson said his parents loved life, wanted it to last forever, and together created something epic. “It was a partnership,” he said, “from the beginning all the way to the end.”

In addition to their son in Santa Rosa, Jeanne and Ed Anderson are survived by sons Edwin Anderson of Petaluma and Gregory Anderson of Chicago; daughter Mary Jo Anderson of Lake County, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

There will be a private family service on Dec. 18. The couple’s family plans to host a public celebration of their lives next summer.

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.